The climate sceptics can finally get excited about the 2012 election: Rick Perry, their candidate of choice, is about to officially throw his hat in the ring.

Rick who?

Perry calls global warming “all one contrived phony mess that is falling apart under its own weight.” Unlike many of the other GOP presidential candidates, he hasn’t expressed concern about climate change in the past, so he won’t have to do any back-pedaling.

Oh that Rick Perry. The Governor only the people of Texas got to vote for. I don’t live in Texas love so why should I get a moist gusset over him even if he is an AGW sceptic?

Notorious climate denier Marc Morano is a big fan: “Based on climate views alone, anyone who is holding their nose voting for Mitt Romney because there’s no other viable candidate will now rejoice to have an option with Rick Perry.”

AGW sceptic Marc Morano: the bloke who gets the Church of Climate Alarmism foaming madly at the mouth. More foaming mad than usual that is. Yeah, I can see why Guardianistas like Lisa the Loser would revile people like Marc. They achieve positive results by applying rational solutions and this kind of extreme behaviour is absolutely unacceptable to tax-frenzied Marxist scum compassionate, wealth redistributing socialists.

The Texas governor will announce his intentions in the early primary state of South Carolina on Saturday, then head to New Hampshire and Iowa to rub elbows with all of the other aspiring commanders-in-chief. As a social and fiscal conservative, governor of a state that’s been adding jobs (even if they’re low-wage), and owner of a full head of lustrous hair, Perry is expected to swagger to the front of the pack in the contest for the Republican nomination.

Gosh! Rick creates jobs, isn’t a slaphead and is in danger of developing a confident gait. What an unconscionable bastard! Clearly, a man unfit for high office…

Perry served as Al Gore’s Texas campaign chair in the 1988 presidential race, just before switching his party allegiance from Democrat to Republican, but conservatives don’t have to worry that Perry holds any residual affection for the former veep. “I’ve heard Al Gore talk about man-made global warming so much that I’m starting to think that his mouth is the leading source of all that supposedly deadly carbon dioxide,” Perry said in 2007.

Ahhhh!Now I get it. Rick is a lefty apostate as well as an AGW heretic. I’m beginning to warm to him.

Anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist, for one, isn’t concerned: “If Perry was president, one of the things I’d not worry about is a carbon tax,” Norquist told Politico. “I’d worry about big spiders eating New Jersey first.”

But plugging your ears and going “la la la la” doesn’t make global warming disappear. Perry’s state is getting absolutely hammered by heat and the worst one-year drought in its recorded history. The hot, dry weather in Texas is desiccating rivers and lakes, devastating farmers and ranchers, and driving wildfires that have burned up millions of acres. In the face of these crises — which are just what you’d expect in a climate-changed world — Perry proposes neither adaptation nor mitigation but rather supplication. He’s been praying for rain and calling on other Texans to do the same. So far no luck.

Under the circumstances, if I lived in Texas I’d be praying for rain too but in a wishful thinking kind of way. In fairness to Lisa, praying for divine intervention is on a par with copulating for virginity – frigging stupid. All of which makes Rick an anti-science, Christian extremist, neo-con lunatic in the eyes of AGW nurturing cultural Marxists. You see, for climate alarmists there is but one green genie god and her profit prophet is Al Gore. Eschewing prayer, the lefties apparently expect to be given access to a magical rain machine that will spontaneously materialise if people are taxed hard enough.

Taxing people until they bleed because of dodgy science and statistics triggered by the unrecovered, and therefore unexamined, bodies of three, maybe four dead polar bears allegedly seen floating in the Beaufort Sea sea after a storm, is a cataclysmically idiotic solution. What about the severe, multiple year droughts of the Thirties and Fifties? The ones not caused by apocryphal AGW? Disastrous wildfires aside, is the current one year drought worse than the one that encompassed nearly all of the US back in the thirties? Has Lisa been partaking of the Book of the Holy Goracle without a biblical pillar of salt at hand to help it go down?

Perry also prays for a rollback of EPA regulations: “Frankly I pray for the president every day,” he recently told CBN News. “I pray for his wisdom. I pray that God will open his eyes. I wish this president would turn back the health-care law that’s been passed, ask that his EPA back down all these regulations that are causing businesses to hesitate to spend money.”

Praying for the return of political sanity and fiscal accountability? Extremist ideas like that should be stamped out immediately before they spread like the plague and give people funny ideas about reducing taxes, reducing the size of the state and allowing businesses to expand and create jobs as well as wealth.

But Perry’s efforts to hog-tie the EPA haven’t stopped at prayer. Last year, his administration filed suit against the EPA to block the agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. The suit centered on claims that the so-called “Climategate” emails undermined climate science, though the whole Climategate faux-scandal has been thoroughly debunked.

So Rick doesn’t rely on God reaching for his heavenly hose and doing the right (sic) thing. He’s also prepared to take direct Earthly action. But Lisa doesn’t like that. Not one itty bitty bit. She’s in total denial that the Hockey Team did anything wrong so it must be Rick who is at fault for daring to question the practices of data fudging, consensus groupthink and post normal pseudo-science.

As for the evidence of scientific fraud faux-scandal, to paraphrase Lisa: Plugging your ears and going “la, la, la” doesn’t make the Climategate emails disappear.

Perry has also fought the EPA in defense of his state’s “flexible” air-pollution permits for oil and chemical refineries. And last month, Perry lashed out against an EPA rule that calls for reducing power-plant emissions that drift across state lines, calling it “another example of heavy-handed and misguided action from Washington, D.C., that threatens Texas jobs and families.”

Maybe because defending the livelihoods and the welfare of the people of Texas against the destructive forces of bogus climate alarmism, green taxes and policies that demonise plant food and restrict the generation of affordable energy for no good reason, is high on Rick’s political agenda…?

As a Texas Republican, Perry is, of course, a friend of the oil and gas industry. He even stuck by BP during the Gulf of Mexico gusher, saying the well blowout was “an act of God” and insisting that he had “full confidence” in the company’s response.
Perry has cozied up to the oil-baron Koch brothers. In June, he flew off secretly to Colorado to speak at an exclusive closed-door meeting convened by the Kochs — even as his state was suffering through some of the worst wildfires in its history. In 2010, the Koch Industries’ PAC gave $50,000 to the Texans for Rick Perry PAC.

Oh, noes! Rick is a card carrying member and apologist for Big Oil and Big Gas, the corporate monsters who…er…give millions to the AGW cause and who pollute the planet with poisonous plant food. He is a receiver of filthy money, donated by people who deliberately use their toxic hydrocarbons as an accelerant to burn Texas down to the subsoil before pissing on the ashes and blaming natural climate variability for the catastrophe. Send in the Green Police and arrest the evil fracker at once!

Perry is big fan of coal too. He tried to speed up approvals and smooth the way for a number of controversial coal-fired power plants proposed for Texas in the mid-00s.

Because no reasonable person in their right mind should be constructing efficient, coal burning power plants that keep the lights on. Coal also allows air conditioning to cool homes and workplaces in a southern state that, drought or no drought, tends to be dry and hot summerwise. We can’t be having that, can we. And lets not mention that Texas has the Chihuahuan Desert and the arid Tamaulipan mezquital because of poor annual rainfall. They existed long before CO2 became the enemy of the universe but I guess that geographical snippet slipped Lisa’s mind because destroying the energy security of the West saving the world from the grip of wicked capitalists and free marketeers is a stressful occupation.

On the greener side, Perry has supported the wind industry in Texas, which now has far more installed wind-power capacity than any other state, and more than all but five countries [PDF]. He also supports a $5 billion effort to build transmission lines from wind farms in West Texas and the Panhandle to the state’s more populous areas. As Tom “Smitty” Smith, head of the Austin office of Public Citizen, explains it, the fast-growing wind industry “warmed his market-based heart.”

A right-wing oil shill seeking to fully utilise the power produced by thousands of existing Texas wind turbines. Unbelievable! And all because it warms the cockles of his black, market-based heart rather than genuflecting to the edicts of the Holy Goracle. Let’s keep schtum about the troubling fact that, during periods of high wind, half of the turbines need to be shut down because the power grid cannot take the extra load.

Let’s also ignore the fact that Rick’s market-based sensibilities slashed 50% off the proposed budget for new transmission lines that will carry the extra energy load by insisting upon upgrading existing lines as well as constructing sensitively sited new ones, thus potentially saving Texas taxpayers $5 billion. Unfortunately, protecting the interests of taxpayers and ensuring Texas gets value for money from its wind turbines just shows what an irresponsible prick of a politician Rick is. Everyone knows that when it comes to public expenditure there are no limits. If taxpayers aren’t cash cows to be milked without mercy in order to fund socialist projects, what use are they? So yeah, when it comes to Big Green soaking up billions in taxpayer dollars, we don’t want any right-wing deniers jumping aboard the gravy train and easing down on the throttle, do we.

Perry has been less supportive of solar energy, refusing to back a non-wind renewable standard that solar advocates have sought. With all the sun Texas is getting this year, that’s looking awfully short-sighted. The crippling heat has had residents cranking the air-conditioning and setting records for energy demand, leading on at least one day to electricity prices 40 times higher than usual. As Christopher Mims writes at Grist, “if Texas had a German- or Chinese-style incentive for its residents to install solar panels, it could save itself enormous amounts of money on sunny summer days, when high demand is matched by high output from solar panels.” And if the state adopted a suite of solar-promoting policies, it could do a better job of attracting and retaining solar companies, which currently are jumping ship to more solar-friendly states like California, according to a 2010 report [PDF] by the Go Solar Texas coalition.

Maybe it’s because Rick realises that solar energy is even more expensive and less efficient than wind, would need to cover thousands of acres of the precious environment in massive solar panel farms. Such farms will be far more ecologically damaging than any power station, for no functional energy gain and to the detriment of the existing power grid. He may also be aware that the incentivised German solar energy industry only survives because it is heavily subsidised by taxpayers and not because the sun constantly shines, which it doesn’t. Left to market forces, solar power would die without the subsidies because it is not commercially viable.

The Chinese cash in because they are only too happy to sell us solar panels while they cheerfully ensure their own coal based energy security will continue to keep the lights on long after ours have gone out. As for solar energy companies heading for the People’s Republic of California, best place for them I say. They can move into the industrial units and factories vacated by viable businesses who refuse to be mugged by tree hugging hippies on a mission to empty wallets in the name of Gaia. Green taxes kill jobs so companies have subsequently gone elsewhere, taking vital jobs and revenue with them.

Lisa continues to wibble on about why Texans shouldn’t vote for, or support, tainted Republican, Rick. She wheels out all the usual lefty smears and ad hominems accompanied by the bitter stench of hypocrisy. Presumably she believes Texas should have voted for tainted Democrat, Bill White, a lawyer, federal bureaucrat and profiteer who enriched himself by millions while in office. But then, such enrichment is a prerequisite of lefty politicians and is a proscribed practice when it comes to right-wingers.

That’s it, folks. This is my farewell post. I will now relinquish my Kitty Counterdom and return to the lurking commentariat from whence I came. Thanks for reading my rants and for mostly posting positive and informative comments. :0)

God is a Democrat. He loves floods and droughts and plagues and scaring the crap out of people, it makes him feel good, and raises his profile.

Great piece again lady, there is absolutely no reason for you to hand in the keys to the Kitty Kingdom, and I’m sure that goes for the rest of your co-bloggers too. Hang on to them for a while longer eh?

I think Bilderberg is overrated as a conspiracy. It’s simply formal networking between the elites of the world. They would do that informally without Bilderberg. It’s sort of, Facebook for nobs, before the interwebs.

I think the thing is that most people haven’t really grasped- perhaps they don’t care, because they aren’t poltics nerds- that politicians do not really identify at all with their own nations, or constituents. Mentally, they are part of an international virtual “village” of people like themselves, who are the class with whom they identify. Bilderberg is just a formal gathering of them.

Bilderberg doesn’t run the world. It’s more that the people who do run the world go to Bilderberg meetings. The conspiracy theory has cause and effect the wrong way around.

I don’t believe in conspiracies. When people all agree with each other, they don’t need to conspire.

Counting Cats (CC) was taken to task by several other commenters for being too squeamish and perhaps even morally neutral about who are the good guys and who are the bad guys here. While I don't share CC's reaction to the video, I rejoice in his (her?) existence. What kind of a world would it be if people like CC didn't exist or if they had to hide their views? Who knows, we might all be living in something akin to Somalia.
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CC's civilized response is precisely why our military is a force for good in the world.